Twitter > RSS: How to keep up with developers

Times are a Changing

I remember walking into a team meeting my first day on the job and overhearing my fellow blogger explaining the RSS feed setup that he used to keep up with developer news. At the time, this was a new idea to a majority of the yet here we are, a short four years later, and the landscape is changing again. Today, if you aren’t on Twitter you are missing the conversation. While RSS remains an important tool in the struggle to remain on top of our discipline, the latest news, conversation, and ideas are happening on Twitter.

Open Source

We all know that open source and documentation have a sordid affair and this expands just as readily to blogs. If you are luck there is a business selling support for the project and they have a blog but there is hardly ever a blog for any apache project for instance. In stark contrast, many comitters are on twitter and talking about what they love, namely their project. Take Apache ActiveMQ for instance, a community that I’m fairly familiar with. There is no blog. If you do some digging you can find a fewdeveloper’sblogs, but these long form posts are few and far between. However, if you joinintheconversationoveronTwitter you are privy to up to the minute information about decisions, up coming features, latest tips and tricks, interesting news, and not to forget a willing group of guys to answer questions and help you along in using their product.

Developer Trends

There are two trends that I’m following closely in the development world, namely NoSQL and DevOps. Both of these topics are changing and evolving on a daily basis and the only way to follow the conversation is via Twitter. Blog posts are often the topic of conversation but to really be part of the conversation you have to join in where the people are. The DevOps crowd is something I’m only starting to get into but @mmarschall and @danackerson were nice enough to put together a great list of the who’s who. In the NoSql camp Mashable has a good list to get you started. However, thats not the end of it. There are people talkingaboutscala, pontificatingoncraftsmanship, and more.

Go Get ’em

The only way to keep up with the conversation is to join in so sign up or start following, share what you are reading, respond to others ideas, and while you’re at it, check me out @bdarfler.